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Today’s guest is Cheryl Malik. Cheryl is sharing how her diet did more than change her body, it also changed her career! That’s because when she went Paleo and took on Whole 30, she became passionate and started sharing recipes in these categories. As a result, she found her audience, or her audience found her. Today she is the creative force behind the popular site 40 Aprons. On today’s show she’s sharing tips on how to get things done, including developing a virtual team that keeps her creative juices, blog, and social media content flowing.

Imagine starting your food blog on a whim, really, but then having a moment where you realize something: a lot of food bloggers are making a lot of money. How do you get your slice of this delicious pie? Cheryl Malik had her aha moment and decided to take her blog, which at the time was more of a creative outlet, and go next level with it. Today she’s talking about turning a food blog into a full-time career.

Meet Cheryl Malik (aka, the Quitter)

Cheryl talks about the times she’s quit in her life, including quitting law school. But who hasn’t been there before? We find ourselves barreling down a pathway and part-way through it wonder why we were on the path to begin with!

Kudos to Cheryl for realizing that law school wasn’t making her happy. Maybe it made someone in her family happy. Parents probably love telling their friends that their kid is in law school. It’s hard to disappoint others in our lives, but Cheryl stood firm and gave law school the boot.

Cheryl describes herself as a successful quitter. She quit law school. She quit a series of jobs. But the one thing she didn’t quit? Her food blog. Although she did go through waxing and waning periods, where her enthusiasm for the blog would ebb and flow, she never gave up on it.

And then she found a job that. She discovered that she was putting a lot of work and passion into helping this organization build its online presence, and it was working. Then one day she had an epiphany. What if she put that same work and passion towards her own thing, her own business?

I plan to never stop quitting. — Cheryl Malik

And so, eventually Cheryl quit again. She described herself as a successful quitter.

You be You

Cheryl admonishes to be yourself. In fact, you’re the best (and only) person to be you. This approach also helped Cheryl to be honed in on her audience.

Cheryl describes how she built trust and reliability with her audience because she learned to be herself. Marly described how that helped you be there for your audience as well.

Serve your audience and be there for them. They will reward you by coming back.

Marly McMillen

Finding her audience was key to helping Cheryl take her site, 40 Aprons, to another level. Now she shares income reports about the money she makes with her site. She credits discovering Whole 30 and Paleo as the key to her success. Having experimented with her diet in the past, when she went whole hearted into Whole 30 and Paleo, she found her people.

When you find your niche, you can own your niche.

Cheryl Malik

Cheryl’s Beginnings as a Food Blogger

With an education in philosophy, Cheryl describes how she didn’t feel confident that she had a backup plan. Who knows, maybe that’s a good thing. If you don’t have a backup plan, you’re going to put your all into what you’re doing!

She didn’t dive right into full-time food blogging. First, she meandered a little in the field of online marketing. She was handling the marketing and social media for other companies and they were killing it.

It didn’t take long before Cheryl realized, if she could make these other businesses successful…why not do this with her own company?

She said she named it 40 Aprons because she has always loved cooking so people loved giving her cooking-related gifts. As a result she ended up with a lot of aprons. Naming her site after her collection of aprons seemed apropos.

Dealing with Old Content

Cheryl and Marly discuss how they deal with old content that doesn’t necessarily fit with their current standards.

Cheryl is open that she has been back and forth with exploring her diet. So, she leaves the old content as is, only updating what needs SEO work.

Marly and Cheryl have both been in the process of updating old content for SEO so they talk about some of those processes.

Show Notes

This episode on How to Never Stop Quitting includes information you’ll want to check out:

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Thanks so much for listening to today’s podcast. I hope you found it informative and helpful to the work you do every day. Make sure you don’t miss out on any of the Chopped Podcast episodes by heading on over to iTunes to subscribe to the Chopped Podcast. While you’re there, provide a review and rating is a great way to help other podcast listeners find it too! That’s it for today’s podcast. As always, thanks so much for joining in the discussion!Posted November 30th, 2018 in Cultivating Creativity, Podcast